Your Life Torn Open, essay 1: Sharing is a trap

This article was taken from the March 2011 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
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The author of The Cult Of The Amateurargues that if we lose our privacy we sacrifice a
fundamental part of our humanity.

Every so often, when I'm in Amsterdam, I visit the Rijksmuseum
to remind myself about the history of privacy. I go there to gaze
at a picture called The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,
which was painted by Jan Vermeer in 1663. It is of an unidentified
Dutch woman avidly reading a letter. Vermeer's picture, to borrow a
phrase from privacy advocates Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, is
a celebration of the "sacred precincts of private and domestic
life". It's as if the artist had kept his distance in order to
capture the young woman, cocooned in her private world, at her
least socially visible.

Today, as social media
continues radically to transform how we communicate and interact, I
can't help thinking with a heavy heart about The Woman in
Blue. You see, in the networking age of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, the social invisibility
that Vermeer so memorably captured is, to excuse the pun,
disappearing. That's because, as every Silicon Valley notable, from Eric Schmidt to Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly
acknowledged, privacy is dead: a casualty of the cult of the
social. Everything and everyone on the internet is becoming
collaborative. The future is, in a word, social.

On this future network, we will all know what everyone is doing
all the time. It will be the central intelligence agency for 21st
century life. As Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams argue in their
2010 book Macrowikinomics, today's "age of network
intelligence" represents a "turning point in history" equivalent to
the Renaissance. They are, in a sense, right. On today's internet
everything we do -- from our use of ecommerce, location services
and email to online search, advertising and entertainment -- is
increasingly open and transparent. And it is this increasingly
ubiquitous social network -- fuelled by our billions of
confessional tweets and narcissistic updates -- that is invading
the "sacred precincts" of private and domestic life.

Every so often, when I'm in London, I visit University College
to remind myself about the future of privacy. I go there to visit
the tomb of the utilitarian social reformer Jeremy Bentham, a
glass-and-wood mausoleum he dubbed his "AutoIcon", from which the
philosopher's waxy corpse has been watching over us for the last
150 years. It was Bentham, you see, who, in 1787, at the dawn of
the industrial age, designed what he called a "simple idea in
architecture" to improve the management of social institutions,
from prisons and asylums to workhouses and schools. Bentham
imagined a physical network of small rooms in which we would be
inspected "every instant of time". He named a tract after his idea,
calling it, without irony, Panopticon; or, the Inspection
House. Bentham's goal was the elimination of mystery and
privacy. Everything, for this utilitarian inventor of the
greatest-happiness principle, would become shared and thus social.
In Bentham's perfectly efficient and transparent world, there would
be nowhere for anyone to hide.

Unfortunately, Bentham's panopticon was a dark premonition. The
mass mechanical age of the telegraph, the factory and the
motion-picture camera created the
physical architecture to transform everyone into exhibits -- always
observable by our Big Brothers in government, commerce and media.
In the industrial age, factories, schools, prisons and, most
ominously, entire political systems were built upon this technology
of collective surveillance. The last 200 years have indeed been the
age of the great exhibition.

Yet nobody in the industrial era actually wanted to become
artefacts in this collective exhibition. The great critics of mass
society -- from John Stuart Mill, Warren and Brandeis to George
Orwell, Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault -- tried to shield
individual privacy from the panopticon's always-on gaze. As
Foucault warned, "visibility is a trap." So, from Mill's solitary
free thinker in On Liberty to Josef K in The
Trial and Winston Smith in 1984, the hero of the mass
industrial age is the individual who takes pleasure in his own
invisibility, who turns his back on the camera, who -- in the
timeless defence of privacy from Warren and Brandeis -- just wants
to be "let alone".

Yet now, at the dusk of the industrial and the dawn of the
digital age, Bentham's simple idea of architecture has returned. But
history never repeats itself, not identically, at least. Today, as
the internet evolves from a platform for data into a space for
people, the panopticon has reappeared with a chilling twist. What
we once saw as a prison is now considered a playground; what was
considered pain is today viewed as pleasure. The age of the great
exhibition is being replaced by the age of great exhibitionism.

Today's "simple architecture" is the internet, that
ever-expanding network of networks combining the global web of
personal computers, the wireless world of handheld devices and
other "smart" social products such as connected televisions and gaming consoles, in which around a quarter
of the Earth's population has already taken up residency. With its
two billion digitally connected souls and five billion connected
devices, the network can house an infinite number of rooms. This is
a global building that, more than two centuries after Bentham
sketched his design, allows us to be inspected every instant.

This digital world -- described by New York University's Clay
Shirky as the "connective tissue of society" and by US secretary of
state Hillary Clinton as the new "nervous system of the planet" --
has been designed to keep us forever on show in our networked
crystalline palaces. And today, in an age of transparent online
communities such as Twitter, LinkedIn
and Facebook, the social has become,
in Shirky's words, the "default setting" on the internet, thereby
transforming digital technology from a tool of our "second lives"
into a central part of real life.

But this real life could have been choreographed by Bentham. As
Shirky notes, popular geolocation
services such as Foursquare, Gowalla,
Google Latitude and Facebook Places,
which enable us to "effectively see through walls" and know the
exact location of all our friends, are making society more
"legible" and allowing us to be read "like a book". No wonder,
then, that Jeff Jarvis, one of the leading apostles of what he
calls "publicness", promises that social media will make us all
immortal.

Comments

I haven't spoken to my neighbors in years.

Elijah Rising

Feb 23rd 2011

Sharing information over social networking sites is making us all the more humane, it is encouraging human collaboration, providing a sense of gratification to acknowledge ourselves and others, to make and take comments, likes and dislikes with our networked peers.It is a new identity platform for human beings and an important innovation how we interact and behave with rest of the world.Privacy is a definite villain here however the only option available to us is to deal with it rather than to avoid it and say in oblivion.We need be aware and taught of the ways of controlling and dealing with this vice. The amount and type of information disclosed, rights to control the access to our repositories and social transaction all rests with us. Once again, quite like other technological adaptation we must ensure that we remain the masters and not the slaves of this new phenomenon.

sadiq sikandar

Feb 25th 2011

Sharing information over social networking sites is making us all the more humane, it is encouraging human collaboration, providing a sense of gratification to acknowledge ourselves and others, to make and take comments, likes and dislikes with our networked peers.It is a new identity platform for human beings and an important innovation how we interact and behave with rest of the world.Privacy is a definite villain here however the only option available to us is to deal with it rather than to avoid it and say in oblivion.We need be aware and taught of the ways of controlling and dealing with this vice. The amount and type of information disclosed, rights to control the access to our repositories and social transaction all rests with us. Once again, quite like other technological adaptation we must ensure that we remain the masters and not the slaves of this new phenomenon.

sadiq sikandar

Feb 25th 2011

Yes indeed Anne B. sharing all of your mundane thoughts and gross desires is exactly how you join the human race. For example, I love sharing that I am at the grocery store with a cart that has a bum wheel. I am utterly convinced that lives are enriched by this sharing. So let's keep it up by all means. Make the world a better place. We are the world./douche alert

Lizb92

Feb 26th 2011

If it was a trap, I say we're (say, Gen Y - callow and impressionable teenagers who're HOOKED to being part of what's universally acknowledged) all jumping in headfirst fearless. Is it, like the article proposes, contemporary mania with self expression of uniqueness that drives this maelstrom of social networking. Are we not just using to feel just like everyone else, that we're part of that page with 500,000 likes? What is the exact consequence of new digital social/media? Or is it just a test of our own self discipline and intrinsic intentions? xx

Jael

Feb 28th 2011

The only solace that we may find comforting is that the social network is based on the free will of each participant to join and participate, much like democracy. And, as in a democratic nation, the structure is based on election (joining) and accountability (the rules). If for some reason Facebook is abused by those who control it, then its constituency, today at approximately 1 billion subscribers, can and will revolt, much like the ongoing situation in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia. Ultimately the power rests with the people.

Adrian

Feb 28th 2011

try unplugging sometimes

jean cave

Mar 13th 2011

Third wave huh? AOL had this wrapped up before the second wave came to shore. Facebook = inverted AOL

socialignorance

Mar 23rd 2011

We always have the choice not to participate in any of this. Also, people still have their private lives in addition to their online life. The problem with facebook is that there is they don't allow multiple personas for work, friends etc, only a controlled filtering of the same content. I can imagine a mass movement away from facebook to a social site that has no monetary agendas. I think people will eventually realise technology doesn't always make your life better, but can complicate life more and distract you from what you value most, which is relationships and life experiences.